Test Cluster invites - a very good decision- any inputs from the testers?

[Loza03]

7 minutes ago, MPonder said:

But it is the "right direction", if you say that, there is a specific destination.

The 'right' direction is just... more gooder.

Point is that there is no final image, no end point. The game being in the right direction is just in a direction where the community generally feels comfortable. It ceases being a good direction when the community says so.

It's about the journey. Something similar happened in 2015-2016 around the time of the Wait - uh, WAR within where we can see a decline in player counts after a period of more substantial growth. Given comments by MCGamerZ in a recent video, I would imagine that there was some kind of similar situation around then - If anything, since Operators were the hotness of the time, I'd say something akin to Empyrean's whole the game is losing its image scare was probably around. Anybody who was there at that time, please feel free to correct me, I joined around 2017.

Examining Steam Chart trends, we see numbers pick back up a little and level off then BOOM, suddenly a MASSIVE spike when Plains of Eidolon dropped, big growth (trough player counts being higher than peaks of old). That leads into substantial growth, which then a long-awaited update comes (Fortuna) around 2018 and it begins to drop again. Once again, the community has ceased to be happy about Warframe's direction. And notably, the 'direction' is quite a bit different. Warframe of 2015-17 was cinematic - cinematic quests, big open worlds with huge bosses. Empyrean, by comparsion, is more Arcade-y, and there's a greater focus on polish.

People's interests change with time, and so Warframe changes with time.

[(XBOX)C11H22O11]

I stopped to look at some accounts and there are a lot of them that were created just to participate. They really need to check everyone that gets selected before letting them in.

Edited April 22, 2020 by (XB1)C11H22O11
Grammar

[MPonder]

2 minutes ago, Zimzala said:

So, because they have the opinion that a PTS is a good thing, you want them to explain thier opinion to you so you can tell them why they are wrong?

It's an obvious turn of phrase that you seem to now want to attack at a pedantic level...

I'm talking about "right direction", not PTS, this sentence has started to be used too much. have you saw PTS on what I wrote?

[Shy0]

recruiting from only the forum (not counting the "pre-selected" candidates, who hopefully are not players who will leak spoilers).. not sure how i feel about that. on one hand, you probably will get the more enthusiastic testers. on the other, forum users hardly represent the general playerbase and will probably skew whatever results they are trying to get. that and they probably won't do as well as "professional" testers.

i can understand the need for spoiler control, etc. but i'm a bit uncertain about this. hopefully, they eventually get a more transparent public test server. hopefully, this means working patches and fewer bugs. we'll see.

[General-Pacman]

Seeing the amount of brand new forum accounts made just to participate in the test server, i really hope that, once the server launches, DE checks how players make use of it. I participated on testing servers in other games (Trove and League of Legends) and it was quite hard for those games to get bug reports, because the vast majority of players in the test servers went there just to fool around, mainly because they were provided with free resources to be able to test things smoothly; so i hope DE keeps that in mind, otherwise the test server won't be as useful as it should be.

Edited April 22, 2020 by General-Pacman

[Zimzala]

40 minutes ago, (XB1)C11H22O11 said:

I stopped to look at some accounts and there are a lot of them that were created just to participate. They really need to check everyone that gets selected before letting them in.

Why?

The PTS will be there for finding bugs inthe code, not designing the game.

They just need PCs of varying shapes and sizes and Internet connections at scale to find bugs.

Anyone that connects and plays can help serve that purpose, they need no specific knowlege or talents, I have wrangled QA people on similar projects.

[Caliboom]

Most of the accounts there literally never posted on the forums, I think DE should choose accounts with more than 100 posts.

[MPonder]

I prefer to not be active forum members, Warframe forum is just a cult. From the Vacuum thread, you can see that the forum opnion can be very different from a good sample of the population.

[Krankbert]

vor 30 Minuten schrieb MPonder:

I prefer to not be active forum members, Warframe forum is just a cult. From the Vacuum thread, you can see that the forum opnion can be very different from a good sample of the population.

I'm curious why you think you'd know what the opinion of a good sample of the population would be.

[MPonder]

21 minutes ago, Krankbert said:

I'm curious why you think you'd know what the opinion of a good sample of the population would be.

I dunno what is THE Opnion of a good sample. But a good sample I think would be inviting using game communication, social networking stuff, reddit and forum (prefer not), not just using one place. The vacuum thread had most people saying no for Universal Vacuum, while actually more than 90% of the votes were yes. There was one thing that was just posted on Tweeter that also got people upset because a lot didn't agree on the survey, but could do nothing about since it was posted in one place that they didn't saw, I don't know what it was about.

So, inviting from different places would be better and more fair for everybody for a PTS in the future that's not just about testing bugs but also about feedback.

Edited April 22, 2020 by MPonder

[Zimzala]

I am curious to know why you guys think the opinion of the player matters to find code bugs?

They won't be testing anything more than that, their voices will not impact the game any more than that, the developers just need more PCs at scale to make tests.

So, it only matters that they have a variety of PC equipment and varied regional Internet access...their opinions of the game are irrelevant, per post number 4.

Who they are simply does not matter for this kind of testing, since they get no game input.

[MPonder]

Reading skills MIA. Again.

" for a PTS in the future that's not just about testing bugs but also about feedback."

Edited April 22, 2020 by MPonder

[Zimzala]

15 hours ago, MPonder said:

Reading skills MIA. Again.

" for a PTS in the future that's not just about testing bugs but also about feedback."

Context is king.

[MPonder]

38 minutes ago, Zimzala said:

Context is king.

Nah, if you were really either fixed in the context about the topic "PTS", you should have read that:

"We will be running all surveys and posts in English - you must understand English to participate." and "We will be asking for targeted feedback specific to our Railjack Revisited efforts for our trial run. All players will be given details on Railjack Revisited prior to launch, not just the Test Key holders."  by Rebecca.

Or about the context of me replying to Krankbert, you wouldn't have posted "Who they are simply does not matter for this kind of testing, since they get no game input."

 

That's pure lacking of reading skills as you couldn't read a simple sentence on page 2.

[XzWasPzX]

En 22/4/2020 a las 6:52, NovusNova dijo:

Hopefully will help smooth updates over with additional eyes on hard to find bugs that might only happen with specific PC setups or network connections.

Though I would caution people who get added to the test cluster to not expect total rewrites of stuff that they don't like when they test it. Usually when it gets to QA (aka testers) the items that are being tested, unless otherwise specified, are mostly feature complete with a focus on bugs, game breaking issues and balancing rather than testing and then getting DE to back to the drawing board and completely change the whole item in question.

 

Thread: https://forums.warframe.com/topic/1187004-public-test-cluster-opt-in-key-lottery/

Focus also on the partners bug reports, they are a very important part of the community. Thats the only thing I ve to say on this. And also, good decission by DE, I hope you begin a new time of good relationship with the playerbase. Good job, the right way.

[Zimzala]

39 minutes ago, MPonder said:

That's pure lacking of reading skills as you couldn't read a simple sentence on page 2.

Or that I had not read that post, only post 4 by a developer, that could be it as well...that I simply had not read that post, only your snippet and wrongly assumes it was from the post I knew about...could be that...

So, we have conflicting information from DE.

Some people think the testers need some kind of 'credentials' for being allowed to give feedback.

No one has ever had to have such credentials to give feedback, so I don't see a reason to have them, but if that's the battle you and other want to have, have a party.

Happy to take in new data, I am only human, not a machine, even if you insist on insulting me. 🙂 

[MPonder]

46 minutes ago, Zimzala said:

Or that I had not read that post, only post 4 by a developer, that could be it as well...that I simply had not read that post, only your snippet and wrongly assumes it was from the post I knew about...could be that...

So, we have conflicting information from DE.

Some people think the testers need some kind of 'credentials' for being allowed to give feedback.

No one has ever had to have such credentials to give feedback, so I don't see a reason to have them, but if that's the battle you and other want to have, have a party.

Happy to take in new data, I am only human, not a machine, even if you insist on insulting me. 🙂 

Playing the victim when it was you that went for me in this whole thread. Nice. A hypocrite in its finest.

Edited April 23, 2020 by MPonder

[Methanoid]

On 2020-04-22 at 2:10 PM, 0_The_F00l said:

That's not how cert works.

Also it does did say you need to have a Steam ID.

The closing prematurely is kinda odd i agree.

probably already had a preselected bunch of people in mind and maybe needed a few randoms to make up the total.

[NovusNova]

2 hours ago, Zimzala said:

Or that I had not read that post, only post 4 by a developer, that could be it as well...that I simply had not read that post, only your snippet and wrongly assumes it was from the post I knew about...could be that...

So, we have conflicting information from DE.

Some people think the testers need some kind of 'credentials' for being allowed to give feedback.

No one has ever had to have such credentials to give feedback, so I don't see a reason to have them, but if that's the battle you and other want to have, have a party.

Happy to take in new data, I am only human, not a machine, even if you insist on insulting me. 🙂 

I see that there seems to be some misunderstanding based on my post in the thread.

1. I am not a member of DE, I am a volunteer community moderator that DE asked to help with moderating the forums.

2. My post was my own opinion and that opinion was formed from reading about what QA does and where it usually comes in when developing games. Usually the main bulk of QA work seems to comes in once the system is complete and is testing to make sure it works and is balanced. Things do get changed, even at that stage, but I personally believe that once something has been created and had weeks of Dev time, DE would rather tweak to improve things before release rather than delay for a complete rework from the ground up.

3. Rebecca's post does state that they want feedback, "targeted feedback specific to our Railjack Revisited efforts". My post was more referring to people possibly hoping that access to test will allow them to throw hundreds of unrelated issues or bugs at DE or hope that they'll be able to get DE to make changes to things unrelated to what they are suppose to be testing. Like trying getting ground weapons or riven system changed when they are testing railjack stuff.

I hope this clears up any misunderstandings from my initial post here.

[0_The_F00l]

As the title says.

Those that participated in the test.

Anything you wanna share and highlight?

Edited April 26, 2020 by 0_The_F00l

[Myscho]

I expected PTS will be longer than 2 days

[Firetempest]

8 minutes ago, Myscho said:

I expected PTS will be longer than 2 days

That's how many work. A few days, targeting specific content when devs have time to monitor it. Then they typically shut down tell the next monitoring window with new objectives.

Edited April 26, 2020 by Firetempest

[0_The_F00l]

7 minutes ago, Myscho said:

I expected PTS will be longer than 2 days

Just the first weekend is over. 

No clue if it is only for the weekend, I hope not 

 

[GreyDeath789]

8 hours ago, Myscho said:

I expected PTS will be longer than 2 days

It seems pretty clear now that the PTS is an experiment that DE is learning how to use...some of the people that were streaming the PTS made statements about how the time window was short and perhaps not 'fair' to all testers given the different timezones players are in...

In fact, Mooha (based out of Germany) was streaming and stated he had about 15 minutes to get his feedback in about the PTS when it was about 11:45AM SUNDAY EST.

This test window seems pretty short. The times seem sort of odd.

It is a learning process but perhaps in the future DE could try to give more time and clearer expectations.

• Two days is simply too short especially considering some players had to download a Steam version of the game to participate.
• The forums for feedback from testers should not lock at the end of the PTS window. Give the testers at least a couple hours to gather feedback into a helpful format rather than forcing rushed comments before the server is offline/locked.
• The times need to be clearer...(would still like to see a longer window for testing)
  • Tester forum access starts at 24 APR 2020 22:00 UTC and ends at 26 APR 2020 02:00 UTC.
  • Player Test Server access starts at 24 APR 2020 00:01 UTC and ends at 25 APR 2020 23:59 UTC.

In the future if DE extended the time window for PTS it could be possible to actually 'hotfix' the PTS to address issues discovered during the testing.

For example, if it was a 7 day window...in the first two days 3 critical issues were discovered so on the 4th day DE hotfixes the PTS and asks all testers to test those changes again. In fact, DE could just plan on doing a hotfix on the 4th day of any PTS 7 day time window so the testers and devs all know what is expected from a time management point of view.

[(NSW)FlameDivinity]

Out of every single instance I've experienced an MMO has chosen a small selected set of players to help decide the course of their games, it has NEVER gone well and has ALWAYS ended up in the death of the MMO. I'm glad DE is trying to improve after their 6 month long crapstorm snowball, but I just don't have a good feeling about this if they don't select the right people - and that's very hard to do.

Edited April 27, 2020 by (NSW)FlameDivinity